The Meryl Streep Movie Club

PROLOGUE

Lolly Weller

Fifteen years ago

New Year’s Day, 2:30 a.m.

The Three Captains’ Inn, Boothbay Harbor, Maine

Silkwood was on. Lolly’s favorite actress, Meryl Streep, with the shag hairstyle that Lolly had gotten as a teenager, and Cher, who Lolly had always thought was spectacularly fierce. The word fierce had been applied to Lolly herself, usually by her sister, but Lolly didn’t think she was fierce at all. There was another word for Lolly, and if only she were Catholic, she would spend every day, twice a day, in confession.

After the phone rang the first time that night, Lolly did something that would haunt her for the rest of her life, something she’d never forgive herself for. The first call had come just after two o’clock in the morning. Her sister, Allie, slaphappy drunk on New Year’s Eve, laughing into the phone about how her husband was in the middle of the Boothbay Resort Hotel’s posh lobby, dancing like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. They’d had four or five glasses of champagne each, and could Lolly or her husband come get them? They were just five minutes away.

Five minutes there. Five minutes to get them to their apartment and safely inside. Five minutes back home to the inn. That would give Lolly fifteen sweet, stolen minutes. And so she’d woken her own husband, Ted, who’d muttered under his breath about damned drunks, but put on his down parka over his pajamas and headed out to pick up the Nashes.

Lolly had done a quick check on the girls. Since Lolly and Ted’s New Year’s Eve plans only involved providing horn blowers and complimentary champagne to their guests at the Three Captains’ Inn, they’d agreed to babysit their nieces overnight. Lolly crept downstairs from the third floor of the inn to the second and quietly opened the door to the utility room, where she kept her vacuum and cleaning supplies. Sixteen-year-old Isabel Nash had dragged her mattress, pillow, and blanket, as she did every time she visited, to the utility closet and was fast asleep, her beautiful face so peaceful you’d never imagine the hollering and cussing that could come out of that pink mouth. Just an hour ago, Isabel had come sneaking in at one thirty, despite the strict twelve-thirty holiday curfew her mother had set and the terrible argument the two had had before everyone had gone his or her own way for the evening. Lolly pulled the down-filled comforter up over Isabel’s shoulder and noticed the fresh hickey on her neck. Wait till her father saw that.

Back upstairs, Lolly checked on her other niece, thirteen-year-old June Nash, who was sharing Lolly’s daughter’s room for the evening. The little room across from Lolly and Ted’s was barely big enough for one bed, let alone the two cots Ted had squeezed in for Isabel and June, but the Three Captains’ Inn was fully booked for New Year’s. Jane Eyre lay open on June’s rising and falling chest, a small, red flashlight shining up at her chin. Lolly turned off the flashlight and put it and the book on the bedside table, moving a thick lock of June’s curly auburn hair off her face. June was never any trouble.

Across the room was Kat Weller, Lolly’s ten-year-old daughter. Kat had woken up when her father had come down the stairs and, within seconds, had on her coat and hat and mittens, begging to go with him. Please, can I, Daddy? There’s no school tomorrow. But it was too late and bitter cold and drunks were on the road, so Ted had tucked her back into bed.

Kat was asleep again, her purple mittens still on and her old, stuffed Eeyore under her arm. Lolly tiptoed over, grateful that her daughter was facing the wall. If Lolly had walked in and seen that sweet face, so like her father’s, Lolly’s heart might have burst, as it often felt like it might these days. She carefully peeled off the mittens, and Kat shifted, but didn’t wake. Lolly bit her lip on the guilt that hit in her stomach, then crept back out.

She had ten minutes or so. She darted upstairs to her bedroom, closed the door, and lay down with the TV remote and the telephone on her stomach. She changed the channel; much as she loved Silkwood, she’d seen it at least ten times and again just a few months ago. She flipped channels, came across When Harry Met Sally, raised the volume just enough to mask her voice, and made her phone call. As they spoke, her heart moved in her chest as it always did, reminding Lolly of what she used to dream about. She whispered, but loud enough to be heard over Billy Crystal telling Meg Ryan just what was wrong with her.

Thirty, forty minutes later—Lolly had lost track of time—an operator broke through the phone line with an emergency. Lolly bolted up and said yes, of course she accepted. It was the Boothbay Harbor Police.

They were sorry.

Something Lolly always remembered about that night was how she’d dropped the phone, her body, her breath, going so still as she stared, in horror, at Billy Crystal’s face. All these years later, she still wasn’t able to watch anything with Billy Crystal, couldn’t bear to look at him, hear his voice. Her dear friend Pearl had noted that thank goodness Lolly had flipped the channel from Silkwood. Or she’d never have been able to look at Meryl Streep again.

CHAPTER 1

Isabel Nash McNeal

Isabel’s plan to save her marriage involved three things: an old-world Italian recipe for three-cheese ravioli, the remembrance of good things past, and a vow to never again mention what was tearing Edward and her apart. She loved her husband, had since she was sixteen, and that had to be that. She stood at her kitchen counter, the recipe, scrawled in black ink she could barely read, next to the lumpy, gray blob of pasta dough she’d made from scratch. Was it supposed to look like this?

Isabel grabbed a cookbook from the shelf above the counter, Giada De Laurentiis’s Everyday Italian, and flipped to pasta dough. Hers looked nothing like Giada’s. She’d just start over. She had five days to get the recipe right. Her tenth wedding anniversary was Tuesday, and Isabel was determined to re-create the last night of her honeymoon in Rome, when she and Edward, just twenty-one years old and so in love, had come upon a tiny gem of a restaurant with outdoor seating and late hours, around the bend from the Trevi Fountain, where they’d thrown coins and made wishes. As they’d sat down at a little round table under a crescent moon on a beautiful, breezy August night, Italian opera playing softly from somewhere, Edward had said he’d wished into the fountain that life would always be like this, that she was his life. Her wish had been similar. Over three-cheese ravioli that they’d both declared otherworldy, Edward had told her he loved her more than anything, that he’d love her forever, and then stood, held out his hand, and dipped her for a long, passionate kiss that had charmed the owner of the restaurant into inviting them inside for the ravioli recipe. In the old kitchen was his ancient mother, who looked something like a witch with her hooked nose and severe, long black dress, a heavy black bun wound at the back of her head as she stirred big black pots on the stove. But she’d smiled at them and kissed them on both cheeks, then written down the recipe in Italian, and her son had translated below it, adding, My mother says this recipe has magical properties and will ensure a long and happy marriage.

All these years Isabel had kept the folded piece of paper in her wallet and had once planned on making the ravioli for every anniversary, but for one reason or another she and Edward had gone out to dinner or been away on vacation. Besides, that honeymoon plate of ravioli they’d shared had worked its magic all these years and she hadn’t needed any assurances of a long and happy marriage; she’d had exactly that. Until recently.

Until their marriage had turned into some kind of cold war because Isabel had begun to want something she wasn’t supposed to want, wasn’t supposed to need, with a fervency that scared her, excited her, made her feel alive in a way she never had. Made her cry—in the shower, in the supermarket, in the car, and late at night in bed—because it would never be.

She threw out the lumpy dough, and as she reached into the sack of flour with her measuring cup, she heard a swishing sound by the front door. She leaned back and glanced through the hallway; an envelope had been slipped under the door. Odd. Isabel wiped her hands on her apron and headed to the foyer, her heels clicking on the polished marble floor.

The envelope, like the letter inside, typed on plain white paper, was unaddressed, unsigned:

Your husband is having an affair. I’m not sure if you know, or if you want to know. What I do know is that you were kind to me once, and in this town, that’s saying something. I’d want someone to tell me—something tells me you would too. 56 Hemingway St. The black Mercedes is always parked in the back around 6pm.

—Sorry.

Isabel gasped and dropped the letter to the floor. She picked it up and read it again. Edward? Having an affair? She shook her head, her knees feeling like rubber, and sank down on the padded bench in the entryway. This had to be a mistake. It had to be.

Yes—a mistake, she decided. Sorry had delivered the letter to the wrong house. It was likely meant for her next-door neighbor, Sasha Finton, whose white Colonial, with its red door, black shutters, and impatiens-lined stone path, was identical to the McNeals’. Sasha’s husband flirted openly at neighborhood potlucks and birthday parties for toddlers.

Isabel’s heart went out to Sasha, who was always polite, who’d waved at Isabel with a tight smile that morning, even though Sasha had clearly been upset as she’d followed her grim-faced husband out to his car.

A black Mercedes, no? Just like Edward’s.

She sucked in a breath and darted into the living room and pushed aside the heavy drapery at the far window. If she strained, she could just see the Fintons’ driveway over the ornate white wrought-iron fence. Only Sasha’s silver BMW was there now. But Isabel was sure Darin Finton’s Mercedes was black. She glanced at her watch; it was just after six o’clock. Perhaps Darin’s car wasn’t in the driveway because it was parked behind 56 Hemingway Street.

She took the letter and envelope into the kitchen and set them on the counter, then put a tomato on top as a paperweight, not that she didn’t want the anonymous letter to blow away, fly up into the sky and away. But then it would land on another woman’s doorstep, another woman who knew that something was very, very wrong between herself and her husband and had been for a long time now. Well before their cold war ever began. Isabel knew that.

But an affair? Edward? No.

Isabel blinked back tears and measured three cups of flour, dumping them on the wooden cutting board. She made a well in the flour and cracked open four eggs into it, careful to beat the eggs gently and incorporate the flour slowly. Once she started kneading with the heel of her palms, the dough turned lumpy instead of elastic and sticky.

She was doing something wrong.

This part of saving her marriage, the remembrance of good things past, might be ridiculous, but Isabel thought if she re-created the evening, that last night in Rome, when everything between Edward and her had been so magical, she would stir something inside him. The mingling of ricotta cheese and sweet marinara sauce would conjure a moonlit table in Italy and remind him of how he once felt about her, how things had once been. She planned to wear one of those sweet, old cotton dresses she’d run around in on her honeymoon and set up a café table in the backyard, under the moon and stars. Re-create the evening emotionally, if not geographically. Bring them back to the start. To the first nine years of their marriage, when everything was good, when she’d felt so safe.

Things had changed, though, over the past year. But she had a plan for that too: never mentioning what was tearing them apart, what had come between them like a sledgehammer. Something Isabel wanted and Edward didn’t.

Isabel plucked up the tomato and read the note again.

The black Mercedes is always parked in the back around 6pm.

Yes, Edward had a black Mercedes. But so did Darin Finton and the Carmichaels across the street and most of the neighborhood.

She heard a car pull into the Fintons’ driveway. Isabel rushed back over to the window. Darin Finton was getting out of his dark gray Mercedes. Not black. Goose bumps trailed up her spine as she slowly walked to the windows on the other side of the living room and peered out through the filmy curtains at the Haverhills’ driveway. Please have a black Mercedes, she thought, then realized she was wishing a cheating husband on Victoria Haverhill. But both Haverhill cars were in the driveway—one a dark blue Mercedes.

Isabel stood still next to the baby grand piano, afraid to breathe, afraid to move.

You were kind to me once, and in this town, that’s saying something…

Isabel was generally kind. Sasha Finton had her good days and bad. Victoria Haverhill? Vicious.

Was the note meant for her? Her heels clattered in her ears as she walked back into the kitchen. She and Edward were both trying, though. They’d both promised to try.

Excuse me, Ms. Isabel, but that dough isn’t supposed to look like that.

Marian, Isabel’s housekeeper, was putting away her supplies in the kitchen closet, her gaze on the lump of dough, her voice kind. No matter how many times Isabel told Marian to call her Isabel, Marian would shake her head and say, "No Ms.," with a smile.

I’ll stay and fix it for you, Marian said. You and Mr. Edward will have a nice dinner.

Marian had been their twice-per-week housekeeper and sometimes cook for the five years they’d been living in this huge house in Westport, Connecticut. A house way too big for just two people. Marian would slyly smile and comment how one of the four bedrooms upstairs would be perfect for a nursery with its French doors and arched windows. Like a fairy tale.

At all hours of the day and night, Isabel would go upstairs to the fairy-tale room, yet another guest room that never had guests, and imagine the graceful white sleigh crib, the pale yellow bedding, a softly tinkling mobile, the tiny ducklings she’d commission an artist to paint along the ceiling molding.

And a baby, Allison McNeal, Allie for short, named for Isabel’s mother, or Marcus McNeal for Edward’s father.

But there wouldn’t be a baby. There was a pact instead, which Edward reminded Isabel of every time she brought up the subject of a child.

There was a pact, which she broke her own heart to abide by. So the letter had to be a mistake. There was no affair. There was no room for an affair in a pact.

Though, now that she thought about it, vows were a pact of their own. And broken all the time.

She managed something of a smile at her housekeeper. Thank you, Marian, but I’m just practicing on this dough. For our anniversary next week. Ten years.

You and Mr. Edward are such a nice couple, Marian said. I hope he manages to come home before eight o’clock for your anniversary. That man works so late, so hard.

56 Hemingway St. The black Mercedes is always parked around back at 6 pm. —Sorry.

Isabel reached into her handbag for her car keys.

Isabel had been sixteen and anything but sweet when she’d met Edward McNeal at the Boothbay Regional Center for Grieving Children. He was her teen mentor, having lost his own parents in a plane crash five years earlier. He volunteered at the center every Wednesday after school. When Isabel’s aunt Lolly had taken her and her sister and cousin there two days after the car accident, Isabel had one session with an adult counselor and one with Edward. The first day, she was so struck by him, by the empathy she saw in his eyes, which were the darkest brown, that she forgot for a second where she was, that she was in this place, in this hell, forever, her mother, her father, gone, just like that, while she’d slept on New Year’s Eve.

She didn’t want to talk about her parents. Or the fight she’d had with her mother that final night. She didn’t want to talk about her sister, June, who cried all the time. Or how she felt moving into her aunt Lolly’s musty old inn with her little cousin Kat, who’d lost her father because he’d gone to pick up Isabel and June’s parents, drunk New Year’s Eve revelers. She’d wanted to hear Edward talk about the moment he’d learned his parents were gone. So he’d talked about the nature of shock, how it had gripped him for so long he’d had a delayed reaction to the actual loss, and that when the shock did finally subside a good six months later, he found himself crying everywhere for months. At school, under the blankets at night, in church, which his older half brother, who was raising him, thought would help and sort of did, for a while. And then one day, Edward said, you realize right in the middle of whatever you’re doing that you’re not thinking about it, and it gets better from there, becoming a piece of you instead of everything you are.

She’d fallen in love with Edward McNeal by the second Wednesday. So had her sister, though it was more of a crush on an older boy. For a while, the Nash sisters, who’d never gotten along, had focused on that, instead of on their grief, taking their anger out on each other. The only reason he likes you is because you’re slutty, June would scream. No, he likes me because I’m me, Isabel would scream back, something you’ll never be, Miss Ass-Kissing Goody Two-Shoes. They’d said terrible things to each other in those early days, and when Isabel would tell Edward about their vicious arguments, he’d say, You know, Izzy, if ninety-nine percent of what June says about you isn’t anywhere near the real truth, the same goes for what you say to her. Think about it. And she would, but then she and her sister would go back to arguing, and June would come out with the one thing that would drain the blood from Isabel and make her shake so badly that June would have to run and get Aunt Lolly.

Within a day, the fights would resume, June insisting thirteen wasn’t too young for a boyfriend—for a sixteen-year-old boyfriend—and desperately trying to get Edward’s attention by stuffing her bra and wearing peach-scented lip gloss. Aunt Lolly had to switch June to a fourteen-year-old female mentor named Sarah, whom June ended up adoring as well. But the chasm that had always been between Isabel and June widened, and they—and their aunt—had never been able to narrow it. Every time Isabel realized that all she had to do to make peace with her sister was to stop reacting, she would react. Badly.

And run to Edward. They’d been inseparable that terrible winter. Long walks from pier to pier in Boothbay Harbor, bundled up against the freezing-cold weather, Edward’s strong arms wrapped around her as they sat staring at the docked boats, her back against his puff of navy blue L.L. Bean down jacket, his gloved hands warming her face. They walked miles in the harbor, sipping hot chocolate from take-out cups, and the farther Isabel walked from the inn, the less miserable she was. One night, in the late spring, as she and Edward lay under the oak tree in the backyard of the inn, they’d held hands and stared up at the stars, twinkling with possibilities that made Isabel feel hopeful.

We should make a pact, Edward had said, eyes on the stars. You and me, together forever. Just us two.

She squeezed his hand. Just us two. Together forever.

And definitely no kids. No kids to turn into grieving, lost orphans like us.

She turned to face him then, awed by how right he was. Just sixteen years old and so wise. No kids.

It’s a pact then, he said. No children. Just you and me, forever.

They squeezed hands and stared up at the stars until Isabel’s aunt Lolly had called her in for the night.

For many years, she forgot all about that pact.

But now they were thirty-one. Married for ten years. Living in Westport, a beautiful Connecticut town filled with young families, with children. Isabel gripped her hand tighter around her car keys, staring at the lumpy pasta dough, remembering how, a year ago, she’d found herself peering into baby strollers at little faces, and strange stirrings would stop her in her tracks, wake her from sleep, make her think that maybe they’d been wrong about how risk worked. Until she was about twenty-eight, twenty-nine, she’d been satisfied with her life. Not a maternal instinct nipping. But as Edward started becoming distant, keeping to himself, working later and later, starting to tell her a story from work and then saying, Oh, forget it, you wouldn’t understand, she found herself beginning to need something that she couldn’t put her finger on. Then came the day, over a year ago now, that she’d been counseling a family at the hospital, where she volunteered almost full-time as a grief counselor. A young widowed mother with a seven-month-old baby and a wonderful, caring extended family, and someone asked if Isabel would mind holding the baby for a moment.

That sweet, soft weight in her arms had made her gasp. She knew right then that she wanted a baby, wanted a child, that the pact she’d agreed to as a grieving teenager had no bearing on her life now. That baby in her arms had lost her father. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be loved, that she wouldn’t have a wonderful life.

Isabel wanted a baby. And she’d made sure of her feelings. Slept on it for a long time until she was so sure, she wished she could get pregnant that minute.

Several months ago, she’d fallen asleep imagining what their child would look like—if he or she would have Edward’s chestnut-brown hair and Roman nose, or her hazel-green eyes and heart-shaped face. She’d woken up in the middle of the night and said in the comfort of the dark, Edward? You awake? He’d murmured, so she’d taken a breath and said that she’d been thinking a lot lately about the two of them having a baby. He was silent and Isabel figured he’d fallen asleep and hadn’t heard her, after all, but then he’d said, We made a pact, Iz. The next morning, he’d reminded her why they’d made their pact. Gently. Then less so.

But what if I changed my mind? she asked.

Well, then we’re at a stalemate, aren’t we? had been his response.

She’d tried talking to him about how they weren’t those same scared teenagers anymore, that they didn’t have to abide by rules they’d made about the world from a place of sorrow, a place of fear.

He would stare at her, with anger in his eyes, and say, "I don’t want children, Isabel. End of story. We made a pact." Then he’d walk away and a door would slam. After a few months of the same conversation, they both started retreating—but from each other instead of from just the conversation. She spent more time at the hospital, helping people who’d just been informed of losses. When she wasn’t needed, which wasn’t often, she’d stand in front of the nursery window, looking at the babies, closing her eyes against the squeeze of her heart, allowing herself to feel every inch of her wish to have a child. Her anger at his resolute stance turned her quiet, and in time he withdrew even further than just being late for dinner or having to work on Saturday mornings. He avoided rooms she was in. And stopped coming up to bed. In the morning she’d find him asleep on the sofa in the living room or the too-small-for-him love seat in his den. The rare times he’d sit down to breakfast, he made her feel a crushing loneliness when he was three feet across the table from her.

Edward, we need to talk. We need to fix this, she’d say over and over, at breakfast, in e-mails, in phone calls, in the middle of the night, when she’d wake and realize she was alone and go downstairs to find him either watching a recorded Red Sox game or just sitting there, head in hands. She’d pause then. Scared. Unsure, suddenly, how to get inside this man she’d known half her life.

And so months ago, Isabel had stopped taking the elevator to the third-floor nursery at work to see the babies. She’d stopped drifting off to sleep thinking about tiny Roman noses and hazel-green eyes, a combination face of hers and Edward’s. She’d made a pact. She’d married, made vows, under that pact. And she’d abide by it. Edward had saved her, and now she would save them. Save their marriage, which had been so strong, so good, for nine years. For so long, he’d come through the door and swooped her up into a hug and kiss her the way he had on their honeymoon. They’d make love and watch old movies in bed, sharing their favorite Chinese takeout. He’d listen to her stories about the hospital, sad stories, and hold her until she could breathe again. And when they’d dutifully visit her family in Maine for holidays, and it would be too much for Isabel, being in that inn, arguing with her sister, she and Edward would walk around the harbor the way they used to, hand in hand, and everything would be all right.

You and me together forever, just us two.

Edward McNeal was her everything. And so she had fought for her marriage these past couple of months. Fought hard.

At first, he’d responded. Her smile had been genuine, not forced. Her gaze upon him full of love instead of resentment. She would walk up behind him and massage his strong shoulders, breathing in the masculine, soapy scent of him that she’d loved for so long, and he’d turn around and kiss her, deeply, passionately, and lead her upstairs. But afterward, she’d notice something, something just more than subtle, in his expression, in his body language. The damage had been done, perhaps even before she’d brought up the subject of a baby, and something had been lost that smiles and sex and possibly not even time could get back.

And so she’d waited. And tried. She tried so hard that she’d burst into tears while they made love, and Edward would shake his head and get off her and leave. And not return for hours.

You can lie, but you can’t lie to yourself, her aunt Lolly had always said.

So she’d tried harder. Just last month, she’d assured Edward she’d made peace with their pact. Yes, she was thirty-one years old now, had been married for ten years, and, yes, she had changed her mind about wanting a baby. And, yes, she believed in her heart that she would be a good and loving mother. But she would put her marriage first. She would take his many suggestions—they’d get two dogs, big ones, like a Rhodesian ridgeback or a greyhound. They’d travel, back to Italy, to India, to the American West she wanted to see so badly, to Africa for a safari, and she’d see how free they could be, just the two of them.

Just the two of them. Even though their marriage was different, even though something had been lost—perhaps irrevocably—she loved her husband and they’d weather through. Sometimes, late at night, she’d think about what her sister had muttered last Christmas at the inn, in the middle of one of their usual arguments when Isabel had deferred to her husband about something minor: God, Isabel, do you even know who you are without Edward? Isabel had been a different person entirely before she’d lost her parents, before she’d met him. And now she was starting to want things she hadn’t before, big, life-changing things. Maybe she was just scared enough to let Edward win. And so that was that. There would be no baby. There would be no pitters and patters of little feet. In the deepest recesses of her heart, Isabel accepted it as enough—almost—that she wanted a child. That told her something. Something good about herself.

Her car keys now digging into her palm, Isabel thought about how she’d believed they were back on track, at the gate, at least, even though he’d told her that morning he wasn’t going to Maine with her tomorrow. Edward never missed an excuse to go to Maine, to visit his brother and wife, and her aunt Lolly, whom he liked, despite everything. He always had, since the beginning. But when she told him about Lolly’s strange call a few days ago, that her aunt had some kind of big announcement she wouldn’t talk about over the phone, but wanted Isabel, her sister, June, and their cousin Kat to come for dinner at the inn Friday night, Edward said he couldn’t go with her. Meetings. Client dinners. More meetings. On a weekend.

I can’t get away tomorrow, Isabel, he’d said that morning. Go and see your family. It’s been a long time, right? Stay the weekend or longer, even.

She hadn’t seen Lolly or June or Kat since last Christmas, she realized. It was now August. Twice a year, at Thanksgiving and Christmas, seemed to be as much of one another as the four of them could stand.

Stay the weekend… longer, even… Did he remember their ten-year anniversary was Tuesday?

What’s Lolly’s big announcement again? he’d asked without looking at her, thumbs on the QWERTY keyboard of his iPhone.

He didn’t listen to her anymore. She’d been fretting ever since she’d gotten the call from her aunt. Summoning the three—the two, since her cousin Kat lived at the inn—was unusual. Isabel figured her aunt was selling the Three Captains’ Inn, and since the three girls had grown up there—well, for Isabel since age sixteen—perhaps Lolly, the least sentimental person on earth, felt the announcement needed to be made in person. Lolly would make her announcement with the same emotion she’d use to note that the lilacs had been particularly fragrant that summer. Then the four would each go about her business, Lolly disappearing in the parlor for Movie Night with her guests, June building LEGO towers in the backyard for hours with her son, Charlie, to avoid running into anyone she knew in town. And Kat avoiding… Isabel.

Isabel hoped her aunt was selling the place. It wasn’t as if it held happy memories for any of them.

Hear me. Care again. Look at me, she’d sent telepathically to Edward. But her husband’s attention had remained on his iPhone. Lolly wouldn’t say, she’d told him. But I’ll bet she’s going to tell us she’s selling the inn.

He’d nodded absently and glanced at his watch, then grabbed his briefcase and stood up.

That was it? No comment? No nostalgia for the place they’d spent so many nights lying together in the acres of backyard, between those century-old oaks, staring up at the stars? Making plans about much more than the children they wouldn’t have.

No comment. No nothing.

Now Isabel stared at the anonymous note sticking out of her bag. She read it again. Then slipped it back into the envelope.

Your husband is having an affair…

Did she want to know? Some wives looked the other way, for complicated and uncomplicated reasons. But it could be a mistake. Last year’s model Mercedes. Someone who looked like Edward, darting through a back door. Or she’d find out for sure that Edward was cheating on her, and then what? He’d beg forgiveness? They’d work through it? He’d swear it was a onetime thing, that he loved her?

Except he didn’t seem to love her lately. A long lately. And maybe he wouldn’t even lie about it.

She could crumple the note and pretend she never got it. That it was meant for someone else. Isabel closed her eyes and let herself drop down on a chair just as her legs started shaking. No matter what she’d do, she had to know.

And it was just past 6:25.

Isabel took one last look